Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate in general to systems and methods for analyzing visual content and, more specifically, to systems and methods for gaining knowledge about aspects of social life of a person using visual content associated with that person and, optionally, for using this knowledge to recommend content such as video advertisements.
Description of the Related Art
Many dedicated photo- or video-centric social networks have come up lately (e.g. Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, and Path). While Twitter started largely as a text based microblogging service, it now supports images and video tweets. Photos truly are worth several words (if not a thousand words) and posting photos, which has become much easier using smartphones, is sometimes advantageous over typing. By looking at the types of faces in photos that people share through their social networks, it is possible to learn certain things about them. For example, if a person's photos are mainly of children and small groups of adults and children, it is likely that this person has a family. If pictures are mainly of large groups of people or roughly the same age, the person is likely a “group person” i.e. someone who enjoys group activities.
However, there are no conventional tools that would leverage the visual content, including photos and videos of a user, publicly available in connection with online social networking resources, to characterize the social life of the associated user. Therefore, new and improved systems and methods are needed that would gain knowledge about aspects of social life of a person using available visual content associated with that person.